Blog for writer Claire McGowan/Eva Woods

Your Vagina: A How-To Guide

(Originally published here http://vagendamag.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/your-vagina-how-to-guide.html)
The vagina is pretty amazing. It can expand and contract up to 200%. It’s self-cleaning, like an oven. It almost never gets caught in your zip. If you’ve got one of these essential bits of kit, be sure you know the rules of ownership. If not they might introduce a licence, and unmarked vans with vagina-detecting sensors will sweep down on your house and instantly fine you £1,000.

What you can’t do with a vagina

Smell from it: If your vagina is expecting visitors, make sure you have a quick run-round first with the Femfresh wash or ‘shower-fresh’ wipes. You never know what people will check under.

Talk about it: In Michigan, just saying the word is enough to get you barred from the Capitol building. This is because if you repeat ‘vagina’ three times into a mirror, Andrea Dworkin will appear and shout at you. It happened to my cousin’s next-door neighbour, honest.

Bleed out of it: As ads for sanitary protection show, periods involve a thin blue liquid, similar to a capful of bleach. If you get yours at twelve and find you’re actually passing blood clots the size of grapes, for God’s sake don’t tell anyone. Just faint quietly in the back of Double Maths.

Discharge from it: Do not think you can befoul your underwear with the green slime women exude (or is that Alien? Potato, potahto). Buy some panty-liners that ‘feel like clean underwear’. Actual clean underwear is not enough.

Have a baby out of it: if you experience discomfort while a nine-pound infant makes its way out of your vagina, please stick to the accepted responses of mild muttering and clutching your husband’s hand. No screaming, tearing, or stress incontinence, please.

Hurt from it: If you’re finding sex painful for any reason, keep it secret. Your vagina is supposed to crave penetration with something huge and throbbing, be it from Anne Summers, the internet, or Darren in the petrol station.

Make noise from it: as Glamour might have it, ‘Hey! It’s OK if your vagina made a noise like fart during sex! Just laugh it off, then immediately leave the country, change your name, and have facial-altering surgery to escape the shame. LOL!’

Touch it: In some studies, only 38% of women say they masturbate at all, but if you’re one of these weirdos, make sure you only perform your onanistic shame with an expensive buzzing vibrator in luminous pink.

Show it to the world: You’ve seen the ‘camel toe’ shame-circles of celebrities in tight trousers. Copy Elizabeth I with a bustle like an ocean-going liner, and no one need ever know the vagina’s hideous true shape.

Let it get sick: anyone who’s had to get through a French oral Final with raging cystitis ‘excusez-moi, j’ai la cystite’, for future refs) will know that UTIs and yeast infections aren’t to be spoken of, even though over 75% of us get them. Drink some cranberry juice and ignore the fact it’s about as effective as dousing a house fire with your contact lens solution.

What you can do with a vagina

Have it surgically altered: Does your vagina too closely resemble your Auntie Mary’s puce-coloured drapes? Then chop it up! Alter those curtains! A labiaplasty is really the least a man expects if he’s venturing ‘down there’.

Keep it nice and tight: Remember, a loose vagina is similar to a loose tiger – furry, dangerous, and liable to swallow things whole.

Search for new and hitherto-uncharted areas of it: Even if you’ve found your G-spot, you don’t get to graduate Summa Cum Clitoris. What about your C spot? Your U spot? Your vagina is not complete without the latest upgrade. Orgasm? There’s a (fl)app for that.

Wax it: At some point, bikini waxing went from being a human rights violation even the CIA would baulk at, to an essential grooming procedure. Smile and pay up as another woman rips off several layers of your skin.

Put things into it: from vibrators the size of a baby’s arm, to specula and transvaginal ultrasounds, your vagina is like a nightclub with an overly lax door policy. Everyone thinks they’ve got a right to be in there.

Do tricks with it: Not enough to just enjoy sex, you must also make your vagina contort, ejaculate, and jump through hoops. With only 30% of women able to come without clitoral stimulus, even the vaginal orgasm is like the high jump in PE – something most can’t do but everyone’s forced to try.

Vajazzle it: the unadorned vag no longer cuts it. Think of it like your folder at school- stick it with jewels, scribble on it with marker, or spell out the name of that boy you fancy. Who’s got the glue gun?

Bleach it: if one’s labia have become dark and discoloured, once again take inspiration from your Auntie Mary and stick them in a boil wash with some vaginal lightener.

Deep-clean it: douches, sprays, perfumes, and pessaries exist so one can spring-clean one’s vagina on a daily basis. And don’t think no one will notice if you skip the bit under the sofa.

Fill it with high-tech sanitary protection, so that when you have your period you can:

-roller-skate while walking a Dalmatian

-roll around in crisp white sheets having a pillow fight

-take part in the Olympics without repulsing everyone and being sent to a menstruation hut, which let’s face it we don’t have the budget to build.

I’m starting to think owning a vagina is similar to owning a dog. You have to wash it with special unguents, exercise it, clip it, and teach it to do tricks. Dribbling is discouraged. Letting it rub against people is considered poor form. I’m going to enter mine in Crufts next year